Budgie Desktop Swresses with GTK on EFL Libraries from ENLIGHTENENT

Desktop developers Budgie Accepted Solution to get away from using the GTK library in favor of libraries EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Library) developed by the ENLIGHTENENT project. The results of the migration will be offered in the release of Budgie 11. It is noteworthy that this is not the first attempt to care from the use of GTK – In 2017, the project has already decided to transition to Qt, but later revised plans, in the hope that the GTK4 will change.

Unfortunately, GTK4 did not meet the expectations of developers due to the continuation of full orientation only on the needs of the GNOME project, the developers of which are not listening to the opinion of alternative projects and do not want to take into account their needs. The main stimulus for the use of GTK was served by GNOME plans for changing work with themes, which make it difficult to create their own design options in third-party projects. In particular, the platform interface style is provided by Libadwait Library, which is tied to Adwaita’s design.

The creators of third-party environments who do not want to completely repeat the GNOME interface must prepare their libraries for processing style, but in this case there is a disorder in the design of applications using an alternative library and a platform theme library. There are no full-time to add additional features in Libadwait, and attempts to add API Recoloring, which would allow easy to change colors in applications, It was not possible to coordinate because of the concerns that the themes other than adwaita can negatively influence the quality of applications for GNOME and complicate the analysis of user problems. Thus, the developers of alternative desktops were tied to the topic of adwaita.

from the features of GTK4, which cause dissatisfaction with the Budgie developers, also allocates the elimination of the possibility of changing some widgets through the creation of subclasses, the translation into the discharge of the outdated API X11, which is not combined with Wayland (for example, in Budgie Calls GDKScreen and GDKX11Screen were used to determine the connection and Monitor configuration changes), scrolling problems in the gtklistview widget and the disappearance of the ability to process the mouse events and keyboard in gtkpopovers if the window is not in focus.

/Media reports.